Edinburgh Napier is committed to the creation of an inclusive culture for both colleagues and students, ensuring they will not face barriers that can be reasonably overcome.
The University provides access to a number of applications to support people with a range of impairments to enhance their working environment or learning experience.
Text to speech
Text to speech is the ability of your computer to play back written text as spoken words. Depending on your configuration and installed engines, you can hear most text that appears on your screen in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Click here to see how to activate this feature in those Microsoft Office programmes.
ClaroRead Plus can read almost any on-screen text out loud.
Scottish Voices can be downloaded to provide high quality synthetic voices with a Scottish accent as the default voice.
NaturalReader 14 provides a range of further voices and accents for reading documents or webpages aloud.
Mindmapping
Mindmapping tools enable you to create visual diagrams of your ideas, structure your thoughts, organise and retain information, and visually communicate concepts to strengthen understanding.
Inspiration and Mindview are professional mind mapping software applications that allow you to visually brainstorm, organise and present ideas.
Screen overlay
Some people find focusing on the current line of text hard, and going from one line to the next as you read even harder.
ScreenRuler provides a strip or ruler across the screen. You can also make the screen outside of the strip darker to help you concentrate on the strip. A coloured underline that goes across the screen and follows the cursor is also available, helping you to stay on the line you’re trying to read and concentrate on.
ClaroView is available within ScreenRuler or on its own. Some people find black-on-white text hard to read, and prefer off-white colours. ClaroView provides a coloured overlay for the whole screen so everything is tinted and easier to read. You can choose any colour you like and change colour and intensity depending on the time of day, the light conditions and what works best for you.
Proofreading
Grammarly is an online grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection platform. It automatically detects potential grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in writing. Grammarly's algorithms flag potential issues in the text and suggest context-specific corrections for grammar, spelling, wordiness, style, punctuation, and plagiarism.
All of the above applications can be accessed via Apps Anywhere – click on the Categories tab and select the Study Tools option.
If you have any questions, contact disabilityandinclusion@napier.ac.uk.